“Fritos,” mused Hank, swirling the smoky liquid in his glass. “Well, Fritos were tortillas once, right?”
On their last night, Nadine and Hank sat on the couch in front of a roaring fire. They shared the red blanket, spreading it over their knees as they balanced bowls of shellfish pasta in their laps. “Well,” said Nadine, “this week has been wonderful.”
“It’s been nice to have the company,” said Hank. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine, actually,” Nadine lied. Her wrist felt better—by the third day she could use her fingers without trouble—but her headaches were worse. “They won’t send me out for a few months,” she said. “So I guess I have some time to…visit friends.”
“You’re going to Mexico, then?”
“I’m steering clear of the Sandy Toes, that’s for damn sure.” Nadine had tried to call her father but reached only a cheery answering machine announcement about the Sandy Toes’ summer season opening. She had left a message saying, “Dad, I love you. It’s Nadine. I just…I needed to get back to work. I’ll call soon.”
“You know,” said Hank, “you’re welcome to stay here. It’s empty all week. I come out most weekends, but the guest room’s all yours.”
Nadine looked at Hank. “That’s so nice,” she said. He shrugged. “Maybe I will stay a few more days. Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“I could do without a city for another week,” said Nadine. “My apartment in Mexico City. Jesus, Hank, it doesn’t even have a couch! A futon and some milk crates to rest the printer on. It’s awful.”
“Do you ever want…I don’t know how to phrase it.”
“A boxspring? Some pots and pans? To tell you the truth, no. That’s just not for me. I’m happiest in the thick of things.” Even as she spoke, Nadine wondered whether she was telling the truth. She had repeated the same story about herself for so long that it was hard to admit how much she was enjoying afternoons reading in a cozy house, the smell of a real dinner being prepared as opposed to a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass of wine, her usual repast.
That night, after he had gone to bed, Nadine watched the fire die down to embers. She didn’t want to leave the living room: the plum-colored glow, books on the shelf, Hank’s teacup on the counter, the blanket that held his dusky, molasses smell. She touched the rough wool and felt tranquil. She breathed in the house, the week they had spent there. A house held on to the moments lived inside its walls, she thought. And Nadine had only her mind to hold her history. She had always been able to keep the unhappy memories at bay, but her brain, jammed full, was beginning to sabotage her. She was so tired.
Nadine walked barefoot across the living room floor. Hank’s room was off the kitchen, a large bedroom facing a vegetable garden. In the kitchen, the dishes were piled in the sink. The ticking of the grandfather clock. A heavy wind buffeted the house, but Nadine was warm inside. She cradled the knob to Hank’s room, and then she turned it.
Hank was asleep with his book in his hand, the light still on. Nadine watched his chest rise and fall. His skin held the caramel color of his Portuguese parents; his lips were full. He had not shaved all week, and there was stubble under his cheekbones: half black, half gray. Nadine slid her pajama pants down, pulled her shirt over her head. Naked, she approached the bed, folded Hank’s book, and placed it on the floor.
Nadine pulled back the covers and eased herself next to Hank. She pressed her lips to his, and something inside her relaxed. Her head stopped hurting, and Hank woke and said, Is this a dream? and Nadine said Yes and moved on top of him.
In the morning, it was snowing, the trees blanketed in white.
Twelve
Hank didn’t leave for two more days. “I’ll tell them it snowed,” he said, lying next to Nadine, twirling a strand of her hair in his dark fingers.
“It did snow,” said Nadine.
“It did snow,” said Hank.
Nadine drove him to the ferry, carefully piloting the Volvo through slippery streets. The car had no heat, and cold air blew around the edges of the convertible top. “I’ll be back on Friday night,” said Hank. “I can catch the seven o’clock.”
“Okay,” said Nadine.
“You think you’ll be all right by yourself?” said Hank. Though he said she should start seeing another doctor in his office, Hank had examined her pupils and prodded her arm and pronounced her self-sufficient. Nadine had not mentioned the terrible pain in her head, or the dizziness.
“Of course,” she said.
He ran into the Nantucket Juice Bar for a drink and came out with a copy of the local high school newspaper, the Whaler. “I thought this might interest you,” he said. “And fudge,” he said, handing over a waxy paper box and leaning over to touch his lips to her cheek.
“You’re too good for me,” said Nadine.
“Obviously,” said Hank.
Nadine watched him run to catch the ferry, a slow pleasure testing itself in her body. He turned and blew her a kiss, and she waved. When she put the car in gear, she caught herself smiling in the rearview mirror. She stopped at the bookstore and bought The Joy of Cooking, planning to practice for a few days before attempting a welcome dinner. “You staying awhile?” asked the store owner, ringing up the cookbook on an old cash register.
“Who knows,” said Nadine.
“It gets in your blood.”
“God forbid,” said Nadine. The woman laughed. Nadine drove to Quidnet Road, blowing on her cold hands at every stop. She was sore from lovemaking and ready for an afternoon nap. She brewed a cup of chamomile tea, smiling and thinking of Hank, his body, his fingertips.
Nadine hummed as she walked into Hank’s room and climbed into bed. She sipped her tea. Next to her, the Whaler beckoned. Still, she resisted for a moment, looking out at the snow, tasting the sweetness of the two spoonfuls of local honey she had stirred into her mug. Then she opened the paper. She was calm until she saw the headline.
Local Couple Heads to South Africa for Son’s Murder Trial
And the sickening thrill ignited in her chest. She scanned the article. Jason Irving she saw, and bludgeoned to death and gang of street children and beat his head with a rock and body flown back to Nantucket and Sophia and Krispin Irving. Nadine held her breath.
She had always felt a connection to Jason, though they had never met. They were from the same corner of the world, after all, and had both ended up in South Africa. But Jason had never come home.
The Whaler article was written by a Nantucket High senior and featured a grim picture of Jason’s parents: Krispin, a wealthy entrepreneur, and Sophia, his blonde wife. Nadine had seen pictures of the Irvings before, splashed over the papers after Jason’s murder. They looked completely different now—old and broken, sipping coffee and looking away from each other.
In Hank’s warm bed, Nadine read.
This holiday season, Krispin and Sophia Irving are not buying ornaments at Nautical and Nice. They aren’t walking off too much turkey on Madaket Beach, either. Instead, the Irvings, who founded Cranberry Creations, are packing for their first visit to Cape Town, South Africa, where their son, Jason, was bludgeoned to death by a gang of street children ten years ago, his body flown back to Nantucket for burial.
Jason, valedictorian of Nantucket High School Class of 1984, went to South Africa to fight against apartheid, the shocking system of separating blacks and whites. Jason taught English to black children in the impoverished townships where blacks were forced to live in filthy conditions, often without water or sanitary facilities. He really loved his students, said his father. “Jason felt it was his life’s goal to fight the injustice of the apartheid government,” said Krispin Irving in an exclusive interview with the Whaler held in the high school cafeteria during free period.
But the young black children in South Africa had grown up persecuted by whites, and some adopted the saying, “One settler, one bullet,” which they yelled as they killed Jason Irving, who was not, obviously, a wh
ite settler, but a young man from Nantucket who incidentally once wrote for the Whaler, too. “They didn’t designate between different white people,” explains Krispin. “These children thought that any white person deserved to die. They believed that killing white people would end apartheid.”
On April 7, 1988, Jason was driving a student to the student’s home in Sunshine township. Some kids, all riled up from a political rally, surrounded the car and smashed the window with a brick. They dragged him out of the car, and jumped on Jason as he tried to run. A group of boys and a young girl kicked him and beat his head with a rock. They murdered him with their bare hands and the aforementioned rock.
Three of the boys and the girl were sentenced to eighteen years in prison each. But then things changed in South Africa. In 1992, Nelson Mandela (who is black and who was jailed for twenty-seven years) was elected president, ending apartheid. But the hatred between the races continued. Like a terrible motorboat, whites and blacks had committed heinous crimes, leaving a giant wake behind. Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, is handling the wake of these actions in a new way.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (also called the TRC), headed by the charismatic Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has invited victims and persecutors to come forward and tell their stories. The commission has already spent almost a year traveling to more than fifty public hearings all over the country to take statements.
If people’s crimes were political, and they tell the truth and ask for forgiveness, they can be given amnesty. In other words, they might walk free! “This process is not about pillorying,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said. “It’s actually about getting to the truth, so we can heal.”
(Author’s note: Desmond Tutu did not say this to me, but I saw it in The New York Times. I wrote Desmond Tutu a letter but have not heard back as of yet.)
Jason’s murderers say that they thought killing Jason Irving would lead to the end of apartheid. They will appear before the commission on January 10, and Jason’s parents will be there to watch them explain what they did to Jason and why.
Krispin and Sophia Irving could make all the difference when they speak at the TRC hearing. If they support amnesty, their son’s killers might walk free into the sunshine. On the other hand, if they fight these children’s pleas for forgiveness, they could send them back to jail.
“I support their application for amnesty,” says Krispin Irving, eating the Dove bar I bought him. “They were young and angry, and they deserve a second chance. I am going to South Africa to tell Jason’s killers that I forgive them.”
Sophia Irving disagrees. While my parents and the Irvings were having cocktails on the Irvings’ yacht, Bogged Down, I was undercover, and I asked Mrs. Irving what she thought about Jason’s killers’ applications for amnesty. “I hope they rot in hell,” she said.
—Janine Lewis, senior editor, the Whaler
It was time to go back; Nadine knew it in her bones. She told herself it was an important story—she had to see the TRC, to write about Evelina’s hearing. But there was more: a part of Nadine was still stuck in South Africa, still living the night she had betrayed Maxim. Nadine picked up the phone. A ticket from Nantucket Memorial Airport to Cape Town, South Africa, cost $2,301. She could leave in the morning. Nadine put the ticket on her MasterCard and began to pack, her chamomile tea growing cold on the kitchen table.
Thirteen
Nadine met Maxim on her first day in the Nutthall Road house. After she dropped her backpack in what would be her bedroom, Nadine sat at the kitchen table and shared an afternoon beer with George. George was writing all day, but his words, he said, weren’t adding up to much of a novel. He was clearly jealous of Maxim, whose photographs were selling well. Maxim, George told Nadine, worked his ass off, driving his car into the townships and documenting the bloody battles there. Blacks were attacking blacks, blacks were attacking whites, and Maxim was making a name for himself, signing with a prestigious agency and garnering paid assignments for newspapers and magazines. George looked wistful as he described his successful roommate.
“And Thola?” asked Nadine. “How did the two of you meet?”
George grinned. “It’s a long story.”
The beer was cold in Nadine’s mouth. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in a week. “So go on and tell it,” she said, relaxing into her chair.
“I was ten years old when I first saw her,” said George. “Her leotard was the color of orange sherbet.”
“Very dramatic,” said Nadine. “I’m guessing you’ve told this story before?”
“Be quiet, you,” said George.
The program was called Dance for All, and it was one of the few ways a child could get out of the townships. “They hold auditions every year,” said George. “Kids come barefoot, hungry, whatever. Kevin Holderman, Thola’s teacher, he chooses the ones with talent, and he trains them. One of Thola’s classmates is in the London Ballet.”
“Fantastic,” said Nadine, smelling a lifestyles feature.
“So Thola came to San Francisco,” said George.
“In an orange leotard,” said Nadine.
“My mother took me to the ballet,” said George, ignoring Nadine. “I fell in love with her by the end of the first dance. That night, I lay under my Batman bedspread and dreamed she was in the top bunk. In the morning, I begged my mother to find her and invite her to lunch.”
“What’s your mother like?”
“Rich, confused, beautiful. Anyway, she found out that Tholakele was staying in the Stanford dorms. She thought my crush on a little African girl was adorable, at first.”
“Is she still alive?”
“What? Who?”
“Your mother,” said Nadine.
“Of course she is,” said George. “Will you zip it and listen?”
Thola arrived late. She wore a starched dress and plastic jelly sandals. She told George her teachers had made her wear the stupid dress. She much preferred jeans, she said, and she was going to be a Freedom Fighter.
Ten-year-old George fidgeted behind his plate of turkey sandwiches. Thola hadn’t turned out to be the quiet ballerina he had imagined. He wasn’t sure what a Freedom Fighter was, and he didn’t know what to say. His strategy of impressing Thola with his collection of butterfly wings seemed increasingly ill conceived.
“These little sandwiches are fab,” said Thola, who had put away four already and was slathering mayonnaise on a fifth. George watched the way expressions came and went quickly on her face: enthusiasm, anger, delight. She took a bite and sat back in her chair, one arm across her chest and the other holding her food aloft. “So, George,” said Thola, “I hear you love me.”
George’s heart hammered in his chest. This was not going according to plan. He could feel his palms and his armpits grow damp. “I…,” he said.
“It’s okay, man, no worries,” said Thola. “You’re not the only one, let’s leave it at that.”
“Oh,” said George. His food sat in front of him on his plate. He never wanted to eat again.
“I don’t have time for boys,” said Thola. “My cousin Albert’s in the MK. I want to be in the MK, too. But I’m only nine, so I must wait. There are more important things than boys, you know?”
“I thought,” said George. “I thought you wanted to be a ballerina.”
“Dancing’s okay,” said Thola. “I love to dance. And I can go places. Here I am in America! It’s great, but I miss my mom. Someday I’ll go back to dancing. When my country is free, I will be a ballerina. It will happen, you know, whitey.”
George was speechless, completely flummoxed. Was there a chance for a hug? He looked at her brown arms, and imagined them around his shoulders. Did she wear perfume? He couldn’t tell from across the table. He wanted to get one milk shake with two straws. Then they could both sip at the same time, as George had seen in movies.
“What are you staring at, boy?” said Thola. “Don’t look so unbelieving.” She finished off her sandwi
ch and leaned across the table. Her face was very close to George’s. Was she going to kiss him? George looked into Thola’s brown eyes. Thola opened her mouth and sang joyfully, “Free Nelson Mandela!”
“Did you have any idea what she was talking about?” said Nadine, opening two more cans of beer.
“Fuck no,” said George. “But she did kiss me after lunch. She tasted like Reddi-wip.”
“Whipped cream?”
“We’d had banana splits for dessert,” said George. He shook his head. “She ate most of mine.”
Nadine laughed.
“I wanted to stay in touch. She gave me Kevin’s address. I wrote her for months.”
“Did she write back?”
“Not for a long time. The company went to LA, New York, Boston. I started researching South Africa at the library. Can you imagine? There I was, this sheltered kid from Pacific Heights, learning about apartheid. I’d never really understood how…how big the world was, how horrible and exhilarating. It blew my mind.”
“It was the same for me. I grew up in a tiny town on Cape Cod. When I was twelve, we went to Boston for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I mean, people looked so different. I heard other languages for the first time. And people were talking about…fucking foreign policy! Well, not at the parade.” Nadine smiled, remembering a dim pub called the Black Rose, where she overheard two students arguing about bombings in Northern Ireland while her father tried to order her a Coke. “Woods Hole,” she said, “they talk about clamming and boats. They don’t want to know what’s going on off-Cape.”
“Something to be said for that,” said George. “A simple life.”
“I guess. But it isn’t for me.”
“I hear you,” said George, and they tapped their cans together, a toast. George sat back and studied Nadine. Nadine touched her neck. “Back to the story,” she said.
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